HDR Pro-Sets: Urban Recreation for DAZ Studio Out Now! [Commercial]

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The sun direction is meant to match the sun in the photos so the lights are "theoretically" locked in place. They're only stuck there if you want it to be completely accurate. In your picture there it wouldn't really break any effects if you rotated the distant light to light up those eyes. Something else you may want to do is increase your gamma value in render settings, I usually have mine set to 1.10 or 1.15. That will help take out some of that contrast.

Wonderful tip with the gamma. I'm making progress, I think. I played with moving the distant light, but I decided instead to just add a low intensity point light near the head to brighten the face. It seems to work for me with just a single character in the scene, and it doesn't change the direct shadow from the distant light. I'll keep experimenting. This is so much fun!!!

The picture on the left is the default lighting with gamma 1.0 The picture on the right is gamma 1.1 and a little fill from a point light. You'll see I changed my guy to a gal. Isn't Genesis great?

Now I'm considering trying animation, so I'm looking for more tips. You have great ones!

In the Promo video there is a subtitle on the animation of a person on an ATV that says "Using stationary cameras means easy animation solutions". Can you expound on what that means? It seems like the camera is moving in the video. Is it just rotating and zooming in and out? Or is all the motion produced by the scene rotating and the ATV moving around? Is the camera parented to the scene or free?

works for me just now on Android but I posted it on my desktop, doing a better one with food on the table, replicated birds flying, 3 Stephie5's jogging and goes for a minute. Will prob take quite a few hours, I liked DT's squirells, fur would look cool.

works for me just now on Android but I posted it on my desktop, doing a better one with food on the table, replicated birds flying, 3 Stephie5's jogging and goes for a minute. Will prob take quite a few hours, I liked DT's squirells, fur would look cool.

It works now. Don't know what was wrong before. I look forward to the new and improved longer one with food, etc.

I have to admit I was on the fence if I needed another lighting/environment product. I'm just a point and click kinda person and don't spend enough time learning about lighting techniques. When others started posting their images with their HDR Pro Set, I decided to see just how easy it was to use to get the results others were showing.

This is how simple is it.

1. Load a HDR light set.
2. Load Xerr and posed him and made sure his feet touched the ground plane.
3. Click on render. I did perform an auto-contrast in Photoshop to improve color clarity.

Now I'm considering trying animation, so I'm looking for more tips. You have great ones!

In the Promo video there is a subtitle on the animation of a person on an ATV that says "Using stationary cameras means easy animation solutions". Can you expound on what that means? It seems like the camera is moving in the video. Is it just rotating and zooming in and out? Or is all the motion produced by the scene rotating and the ATV moving around? Is the camera parented to the scene or free?

Your first thought was right, it's not doing any movement other than rotation and zoom during the animations. You get parallax issues when the camera is actually moved and the stuff you have placed in your scene starts to slide around.

Thanks to everyone posting renders! I'm glad it's turning out as easy to use as I'd hoped it would be. I have some family that grew up around where these pictures were taken so it'll be fun to show them what you guys do.

This is a quick set up, load a set, loaded & posed a dinosaur I found hiding in my runtime, Rotated the figure and camera around to get an angle I liked, lowered the Dinosaur a fraction so it sat into the shadow catcher plane slightly and rendered, a couple of minutes later this is what I had. No post work except to convert the saved PNG file to a slightly compressed JPG (95% quality via GIMP).

yeah, I doubt a lot of the time people look at animation links
that barbeque at the end of the table is a pain, for my next video I am now rendering I masked it roughly with a shadowcatcher plane but for a still render I would need to do a cutout vertex model to get those handles etc

My wishlist would be some additional environments that have more dirt and hard surfaces to "walk" on. If there's any weakness at all (and I'm being incredibly picky mentioning this), it's that 3D models can look as if they're "floating" on blades of grass on lawn surface.

I'd love a castle courtyard, but doubt there's a spare replica of Stirling Castle in your back garden, LOL.

An idea I had, but have absolutely no clue how it would be done, is would it be possible to do multiple renders of a DAZ Studio scene that could be converted/worked into an HDR background? If so, we could end up with some awesome fantasy & Sci-Fi sets to place our action in.

lol, you need a grassy shadowcatch surface!
I often fake it in Carrara by replicating actual grass model mesh on the shadowcatch plane, dunno how you would do in studio, noise displacent maybe but would it shadowcatch?

lol, you need a grassy shadowcatch surface!
I often fake it in Carrara by replicating actual grass model mesh on the shadowcatch plane, dunno how you would do in studio, noise displacent maybe but would it shadowcatch?

Not only that....but to be really picky...if you have just sand or dust...the model will have to leave footprints and dust. I do look forward to more backgrounds....especially city...grungy alleys...night settings.

Yeah Wendy is right, the idea of using grass models as the shadow catcher works great in Carrara but it doesn't translate to DS. I've tried doing it with displacement and other things but can't get it working. The problem is that the transparent bits show self-shadows (parts where the shadow catcher casts shadows on it's self because of actual features), it turns into a jumbled mess of shadows. It's actually really easy to do in post though if you guys would like me to show you.

The next set has many more hard surfaces, more sand and stone paths, rock etc. I've got to find a middle ground though if I'm going to try for extreme fantasy as well. Can't get deep forest sets without grassy bottoms.

Night settings I'm very interested in and believe I can do, but it will take a lot of trial an error until then. I need to look into noise averaging so I can take multiple fast pictures and keep time down for movement.

You could make HDRIs of DAZ Studio environments if you wanted to, I've done it in Carrara for personal usage (Vue is easier). Distributing them wouldn't fly on the legal side though, would be competition from a direct derivative.

dreamlight does it for moviemaker using some of Jack Tomalin's sets.
I put a few Howie Farkes 360 renders up on sharecg with the suggestion it WOULD make you want to buy Carrara and his scenes!!
and the general reaction has been indeed "I must buy THAT now I see how cool it looks in 360"
those are just really renders and in the art section with acknowledgement of the source.
but selling them commercially unaltered as is would be probably another matter, but putting buildings etc in and personalizing it with different plants should be ok, still just a render.
a 360 render.
people sell backgrounds.

That's not how it works. A render isn't just a render if it can be used even partially as a replacement for the commercial product it's a render of. It wouldn't be okay to render out billboards of Howie's trees to distribute either, because that could hurt his sales. The panoramas I remember you posting were stuck within a virtual flash setting only allowing people you look around the scene which isn't a problem, but sending out 16k images with matching lighting and shadow catchers means you're getting close to replacing the original.

Ok this thing is freaky cool and exactly what I needed for DAZ. If you are looking for an awesome background tool for DAZ folks this is it!

I was wondering if you might be thinking of selling/giving out a template/tutorial so we can make our own backgrounds? I would love to make some stuff in Bryce then turn it into a background for this as I really would like a city ruins to use with this, not something you can easily go out and take pictures of.

I bought this yesterday and absolutely love it. Can't wait for more sets to be released. I wanted to see how custom backgrounds would work so I downloaded some freebie HDR images from the net and converted them to jpgs (for the skydome) and Tiffs (for the uberenvironment light). I'm really pleased with the results and am looking forward to trying a proper scene with buildings and figures. Thanks very much for this wonderful product.

Here is a quick render I did, there is a lot of very quick post work with fire, and smoke also increased the brightness so you can see the head set she is using to call for a ride, since she broke her ride :) Too bright I think...

dreamlight does it for moviemaker using some of Jack Tomalin's sets.
...

And Dreamlight ran into troubles for using Stonemason's ... they did come to an agreement, but it wasn't pretty.
Just a warning.

So that's what happened to Movie Maker. That's a shame....but it's also shameful to "borrow" someone else's work and profit from it. That's a major no-no. As a fine artist, I've had to come down on people for using my images to make greeting cards etc In most cases it was ignorance of the law...but no excuse, I'm afraid.

@DryJack...wow, I didn't realize you could modify the pics in HDR Pro-Sets. I may give that a try. I know it won't be the results that the original set is getting....but they might do in a pinch.

@DAZ User #7896....May I call you Daz?... Nice job on the spaceship's "radiator" trouble. I tell you....this park is one strange place.

@Kinich You'd better be sure that goat is moving....because you will be.

Thank you Pete.c44, and Yes you may call me Daz, dang forum never saw a forum where it was so hard to change your user name. Apparently that was auto assigned to me and I need an admin's permission to change it. :)